Wimsatt and Beardsley, New Critics, argued that deriving the standard of criticism from the author's intent confuses the work with its origins, the genetic fallacy, ending in biography and relativism. Evidence is internal: the poem's language, structure, effects. The companion essay, The Affective Fallacy, 1949, barred the reader's emotions for the same reason: the poem disappears into its causes or its results. A poem should not mean, but be. Barthes's death of the author radicalized it; the counter-tradition, Hirsch, rhetorical critics, never accepted the autotelic text.
The doctrine's best evidence is accidental: every sacred text in this archive outlived its author by millennia, and the readings that rule are the ones the authors could not have intended, Torah through Wellhausen's scissors, Revelation through Zionist and Marxist lenses, the Constitution through originalism and living-constitutionalism simultaneously. The fallacy is not a literary theory. It is the biography of every canonical document: written once, intended once, read forever, owned by whoever holds the current horizon.
The claim: banning intention is the critics' own eisegesis, an interpretive preference crowned as logic, and its real function was professional: it transferred custody of meaning from authors, unanswerable, to critics, billable; the author died so the interpretation industry could inherit. Verdict: the rhetorical-critic rebuttal says exactly this, the fallacy label is ideological branding. But the doctrine also freed readers, and the archive splits the file: intent is one tier among three, never the verdict. The author's testimony is Stories. The text's structure is Documented. What it does to you is, at most, Interesting. Judge the pudding. Ask who cooked it. Do not let either answer silence the other.
If the author is dead to the text, who owns the meaning: the reader, or the loudest reader?